Some Corner of a Foreign Field

This anthology combines some of the greatest poetry to have emerged from the 1914-18 conflict with an extraordinary collection of paintings from contemporary artists, mainly sourced from the Imperial War Museum.

In 1914 Rupert Brooke wrote “Now God be thanked who has matched us with this hour”.... but he had yet to see active service. As the war progressed, poets of all nationalities, on the front or at home, men and women, wrote otherwise. Some of their words will be familiar such as Edward Thomas’ A Private, the American Alan Seeger’s Rendezvous and the Canadian John McRae’s In Flanders Fields.

As the poets wrote of every aspect of the war so their artist contemporaries captured scenes of both chaos and compassion, horror and humour, which sometimes no words could describe. Paul Nash’s battle-torn wastelands portray a savage world, far removed from the gentle landscapes evoked longingly by his brother John. The lonely torment of the women at home depicted by artists such as Harold Gilman is no less moving than the images of suffering in the trenches by CRW Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and Percy Wyndham Lewis.

Some Corner of a Foreign Field sets the written and visual records of the Great War side-by-side: together the poems and paintings speak for themselves, for each other and, above all, for those who fought and died.